The Epic of Gilgamesh survived on clay — fired in the burning of Nineveh in 612 BCE, buried for nearly two and a half millennia, and unearthed by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in the 1840s. The twelve tablets that make up the Standard Babylonian recension were among some 30,000 tablets and fragments recovered from the Library of King Ashurbanipal.
Below are images of the key tablets that contain our poem. These are photographs of the originals, now housed in the British Museum. We include them not merely as decoration but as witnesses: the poem is the clay. The wedge-marks you see are the voice of a civilization that vanished three thousand years ago, speaking to us through fire and earth.
That is the whole work.
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